Physicians around the world access medical images to help diagnose and treat patients and disease, to collaborate with colleagues and to provide decision support and education. Physicians display medical images at various locations including hospitals, doctor's offices, and on various devices including but not limited to high resolution special purpose displays, PCs, cell phones, PDAs, etc.
Clinical quality images can be 12 bits of depth or more, and can be displayed with 4096 or more shades of gray. This broad grayscale range permits miniscule pathological or structural abnormalities (such as tumors, calcifications, and fractures) to be viewable to the human eye for diagnostic purposes. Providing sufficient grayscale reproduction on web-based platforms presents challenges. Many existing solutions require an operating platform (e.g. Windows, Mac, and Linux) specific implementation (e.g. ActiveX controls, Netscape plug-ins). “Pure” web browser based solutions require that the Web server generate and deliver images for every presentable situation. This approach is very server and network intensive and therefore it is very difficult to achieve interactive manipulations with this approach. It is even more difficult to scale these approaches to an internet based solution. Rendering is sometime facilitated by the use of rendering engines which convert specifications for images into pixels for display on computer screen (e.g. Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight). The rendering engines can include specialized software or hardware components.